When I walk in in the mornings I think each day I'm going to see something that works. But it's a
very difficult restoration to know how far to take some of it, and it involves constant discussion.
So Jill it's so wonderful to be looking at this picture with you.
I'm Caroline Campbell, I'm Director of Collections and Research, and I'm the curator of this painting
which is an enormous honour. [Jill: ] I'm Jill Dunkerton, Senior Restorer, in the Conservation department.
It's an even greater honour for me. I've adored this picture since I was a child.
This is painted by Piero della Francesca who for me is one of the most extraordinary figures
of western art, but he produces very few paintings, and they are as remarkable for their
sense of landscape, their sense of mathematics - he was a great theorist and mathematician as well -
and for the sense of great peace and space there is in them, and here at the National Gallery we
remarkably have three pictures which span his career. So this painting was made probably for the
artist himself and certainly for his family palace. We think of Renaissance artists as being, you know,
poor, being workmen, but Piero was very prosperous, and he was very very well regarded in his hometown.
He was one of the most important citizens, so it was really appropriate that he would make this
type of object for himself. It's an extraordinary feeling the idea that he might have done this
for himself, that there's no patron, that he's not having to do anything that a patron is asking.
It's a deeply personal picture. It is extraordinary. When we think about these
artists lives being so long ago, but yet in the work that we do we feel we get really close to
them. What's so important about this painting and the way it's landscape setting as well, these
gorgeous hills here and wonderful reflections, so typical of Piero, is that this scene of the
nativity is happening not in the Holy Land, but it's happening in the artist's own world and place.
I think we have to imagine walking along this rather dry, dusty path, and there's an old shed,
you still see old sheds like that by the way around Sansepolcro, dry stone building, and
suddenly, this vision of the birth of Christ, and this vision actually comes from the visions of the
14th century Swedish mystic and saint Bridget. The Virgin Mary is kneeling in front of this stable
with her son, the infant Christ, and she is supposed to be somebody who has no possessions,
but in Piero's representation she's incredibly beautifully dressed, and she's got pearls in her
hair, and also this wonderful jewellery around her neck. What I love as well is this sense of the
little Christ child. He's naked, he's lying there, and he's lying on his mother's robes, and
they aren't just any robe, but they're made out of the most brilliant wonderful blue pigment,
and you know, he's separate but he's also attached to her. I think that's a sort of detail typical of
this artist and the way in which he really thinks. And the blue pigment, which is very very expensive,
lapis lazuli, natural ultramarine, he's not sparing anything for the cost of his own picture, is used
so beautifully through this picture. The other thing is that Piero always paints his male
figures with a completely different technique. Yeah you're absolutely right, when you look here, I mean
how beautiful these these clear, pale faces are, and then these are deliberately, these have a very
solid under painting, yeah which is missing from his men, and you actually see it in other pictures,
that the painters become more transparent, and they always have this much more ruddy complexion.
That has been one of the things that's made them more vulnerable to the rough cleaning,
and so they're never going to look the same, but in a way that's quite a consolation to know that
they shouldn't look the same, and they won't. I think that is important to realise because
otherwise you know you would want to use the visual evidence before you. But the reason
he's doing that of course is that in Renaissance Italy, men were supposed to go outdoors and do the
work and women were supposed to stay indoors and be wonderfully perfect and pure, so that's why you
get this there's this real difference in in skin colour. The conservation history of this painting is
let's say unfortunate. Although it has this marvelous provenance it was in Piero's family,
I think they didn't look after it very well. In later generations it seems to have been put on
an altar at some point, and they managed to burn it. There are two candle burns there in the lower part,
and at some point it underwent a very ferocious cleaning, probably to remove, we still see at the
edges the remains of this, very old brown varnish. And whoever took that off wasn't very careful,
and caused quite a lot of damage, but there were also huge problems with the wooden panel.
And this painting in the 19th century even had a reputation for being in bad condition, and then the
National Gallery acquired it eventually and they cleaned it again, and when they cleaned it it was
actually photographed, and here we actually have a photograph of the condition of the painting in
1884. I think this is probably the oldest example of a conservation photograph in the Collection,
and we can see from this photograph, although it's not a great one, that already the painting
had huge problems of condition and we have these conservation records which are these
histories. They were only put together in the 20th century, just after the last war,
but everything that's known about the conservation is put into them,
but it's wonderful having this record which goes on for volume after volume showing the treatment.
This project has taken way longer than we expected because of the pandemic, which isn't always a bad
thing, that gives us a lot of time to stop and think about the right way to do things,
and what the best approach to this painting is. When I cleaned the picture last summer, I made
a remarkable discovery. I'd always wondered why, before cleaning, this angel had a rather sort of
ugly squiffy eye and a narrow face, and why there was so much retouching on the lute. I should have
guessed because when we removed the retouching it became clear that when the central join
was rejoined in the 19th century in order to make a clean join they just slightly planed
along either side and in doing that we lost a small amount of paint. Now it's a very small
amount, and just fractionally over one millimeter, but the consequences for a painting like this both
because this is Piero, who is the most precise of artists, but also because it was going through such
an important place, through a face, through the lute, which of course should be in perspective, through
the child, was very unfortunate because there was always going to be a step. The last restorer tried
to fudge it but it's not really very successful. Almost any other painting we would have just
accepted it and said well, this has happened, but because it was Piero, and because of the effect,
we started talking about whether it might be possible. We had to open that join. It never touched
the original material, because they were going just through the balsam wood build up on the back from
the 1940s, and then they were able to open the 19th century glue, and to insert that missing
well one millimeter and a few microns to recover enough space for this to work again,
to be able to restore the eye of the angel and the lute and this beautiful column of drapery
and then right down to have space for the child's fingers. It was a brilliantly precise
piece of panel work. There was no point in doing it if it wasn't precise and they did it.
Everything in Piero's world has to be very organised. Yes, it has to be rather perfect, it's
like a more perfected version of the real, of the real world. This is an artist who was also
a mathematician. We often separate the arts from the sciences today, wrongly, and this is certainly
not the way in which people thought in Piero's time. Everything is meticulously planned and
that's why in this conservation treatment we've been really keen to get every bit of
Piero's original composition back from what Jill was telling you about the the face of the angel.
If you'd like to know more about the collection then go here, and if you want
to watch more about conservation, here, and we hope to see you again in a few months time.